Elon Musk has been through a lot with Tesla, and a recent story shows how little faith some of Wall Street’s old guard placed in the automaker, early on.
Musk shared an anecdote on Twitter of well-known investor and Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger, in which latter said Tesla would fail.
“I was at a lunch with Munger in 2009 where he told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail,” said Musk on Wednesday. “Made me quite sad, but I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway,” added Musk.
Fast forward to 2022, Tesla has a market cap of $912 billion and Musk is the world’s richest man with a net worth of $236 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, with Munger not part of the list’s top 500.
I was at a lunch with Munger in 2009 where he told the whole table all the ways Tesla would fail.
Made me quite sad, but I told him I agreed with all those reasons & that we would probably die, but it was worth trying anyway.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 16, 2022
The tweet came in response to a story about Munger boasting of avoiding cryptocurrency, which Musk and Tesla are well-known for supporting.
In a statement about cryptocurrency on Wednesday, Munger said, “I’m proud of the fact I’ve avoided it.” Munger continued, “It’s like some venereal disease … I just regard it as beneath contempt.”
At the end of 2021, Tesla was holding nearly $2 billion in Bitcoin, and the company still accepts Dogecoin as payment for some of its merchandise items.
